Unlike some of the original horror movies that 20th Digital Studio has produced for Hulu, The Mill isn't adapted from an episode of the company's Bite Size Halloween anthology series, but that doesn't stop it from feeling like an overextended short film. There's a simple, well-worn sci-fi/horror concept at the center of The Mill, which invites comparisons to shows like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). The problem is that The Mill doesn't offer any particularly interesting variations on that familiar set-up, and its storytelling becomes monotonous over the course of 105 minutes.
Anyone who's seen films like Cube or The Maze Runner — or remembers the Twilight Zone episode "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" — will recognize what's going on when corporate middle manager Joe (Lil Rel Howery) wakes up disoriented in some sort of prison cell. He doesn't know where he is or how he got there, but he soon discovers that he's a prisoner in a sadistic experiment run by Mallard, his Amazon-like behemoth employer. Stuck in the cell, Joe is subject to seemingly arbitrary rules of behavior that no one informs him about, and his only source of information is an unseen fellow prisoner in the next cell over, who talks to him through a busted grate.
The disembodied voice of an Alexa-like digital assistant informs Joe that his job is now to push a giant millstone around in a circle every day, fulfilling a quota of completed revolutions. Among the inmates, the person with the fewest number of completed revolutions is "terminated"... and that doesn't just mean they lose their job. Everyone there is a Mallard employee who's been selected for this demented training activity, a lesson in literally putting their nose to the grindstone and fully devoting themselves to the company that essentially owns them.
Howery is the only person onscreen for the majority of the movie, and there are only so many different ways that director Sean King O'Grady can depict him turning the millstone before it gets tiresome and repetitive, both for the character and the audience. Joe's efforts to escape or rebel don't amount to much, and it's not hard to guess that the story is building to a climactic twist. Unfortunately, that twist will be just as familiar to genre fans as the initial scenario, and it makes much of the preceding movie feel like an elaborate windup that's just wasting the audience's time.
Although the script by Jeffery David Thomas isn't especially inventive, Howery is a compelling screen presence, and he effectively commands attention without any other actors to directly interact with. Howery is best known for comedy, and he brings a sardonic edge to Joe without undermining the gravity of his situation. The design of Joe's cell is fairly minimalist, but the digital projections of the Mallard operating system are often playful, touting an amusing variety of Mallard products that "sponsor" each day's punishments and terminations. The Mill's social commentary is hardly sophisticated, but it could have been a more effective satire by leaning into the dark, deranged elements, closer to something like the 2019 Spanish sci-fi allegory The Platform.
O'Grady's previous feature, We Need to Do Something, was also a horror movie set almost entirely within a single confined space, but he still hasn't quite mastered that challenge. Working from such mediocre material, The Mill needs bold stylistic choices to set itself apart, but it mostly just looks like every other piece of streaming content. It may not actually be part of an anthology series, but it's too forgettable to stand on its own. ♦
THE MILL
